Unusual Love Story
by nathan-p
Summary: Jeb/Iggy. He knew it was wrong. And yet... An assortment of drabbles, poetry, and assorted ephemera.
1. The Whole Story

I was captured by your symmetry  
Bewitched by your impossibility  
What made you this way?  
Your delicate hands decided  
I didn't need to know  
And traced lines of fire down the pathways of my nerves.  
I was enchanted.

You were my sin;  
My break from protocol;  
My escape from procedure  
And scientific law.  
Your wings fluttering around me  
Erased my worry  
Calmed my troubled mind  
Made me, as you were, more than human.

Your design was baffling:  
In the terse language I wrote you in  
You were perfect  
And yet in the world you were  
Flawed.  
I admit, we failed to correct that:  
But in the attempt  
Created something more elegant than I had ever designed.

I knew it was wrong  
And yet persisted:  
Your reaction was a valediction.  
It was as much your sin as mine.  
Nothing continued to matter;  
I was caught up in you.

From your response to me I've learned  
The language of emotion;  
You've taught me  
How to touch you -- where  
The most sensitive skin is  
On the delicate body of yours  
That I designed so many years ago.  
Facts I had never contemplated, those,  
And you taught me their significance.

And yet.  
If we meet elsewhere  
You won't acknowledge me.  
I deliberately stay away from you.  
We are disconnected.  
Perhaps that's as it should be.  
I refuse to smile  
When your hand brushes mine.  
Someone might see.


	2. Morning

Compared to Subject Eleven, the blind boy is nothing to be afraid of -- where designing her almost broke him, the blind boy was a reiteration of old principles. Jeb made no major changes in his design from Maximum's.

And yet he's so much different from her.

Jeb can't keep his eyes off the blind boy. Aesthetically, he's the most beautiful of any of the recombinants: fair-complexioned with light hair and eyes, with elegant, simple features.

"Morning, Iggy," he says, struggling to keep all the emotion he feels out of his voice. If Max knew...

The blind boy just smiles.


	3. Sleep

Jeb's made his old mistake again -- he's gone and fallen in love.

This time, it's with one of the avian recombinants -- and in the odd hierarchy of the School, there's no sin greater. (No, not even murder.)

Then again, who'd blame him? The blind boy is lovely, after all -- and he belongs only to Jeb, given that after the failed surgery no one else wants to risk anything on him.

"We're two of a kind," he murmurs, watching the blind boy sleep. "Both of us are failures."

His eyes move restlessly, and Jeb smiles.

"You and me, Iggy," he sighs.


	4. Trust

Jeb's not used to trusting. Too often it's ended in pain and betrayal and lying awake wondering _Could I have done something differently?_

He knows that Max must hate him for what he's done. He doesn't blame her, even though it hurts to have incurred her anger for something he had to do. (It was for your own good, he struggles to tell her, but she never listens.)

The remarkable thing is that Iggy understands. That despite what Jeb has been to him and the rest of the flock, he _trusts_ Jeb.

It's remarkable: the blind one is the kindest.


	5. Scarred

Tic-Tak!: Soz, but it's a collection of drabbles and random poetry at the mo. Should I be possessed to write something longer for this ship, it'll be posted here. Until then, chapters probably won't be terribly long ('cause, y'know, drabbles are short).

* * *

There are small scars mapping the boy's skinny shoulders -- thin raised white lines against the pale skin. Jeb brushes his fingertips over them.

Iggy flinches away. "It's nothing."

"Ssh." Iggy's skin is warm, but he's shaking. Jeb draws Iggy closer to him.

"Don't you tell me it's going to be all right."

"I wouldn't," Jeb promises. "Not if it wasn't true."

Iggy's been playing with Jeb's hands, and guilelessly Jeb directs the boy's fingertips to the inside of his own wrists, where there are voiceless, faded scars.

"Oh..." Iggy says quietly.

"You're not alone," Jeb says, and holds him close.


	6. Rescue Effort

Yes, I can count. This one's a 1.5 drabble.

* * *

"Don't you ever,_ ever_ touch that subject again."

Iggy can't see it, but he hears Jeb slap the other whitecoat.

"If I see you in this lab again," Jeb hisses, "I'll have you fired on the spot. I don't need _anyone_ damaging my experiments, least of all trash like _you_. Do you understand?"

The other whitecoat whines something about physical exams, and Jeb slaps him again.

"I know that's not what you were doing, you silly little _prick,_" Jeb says.

_Not what it looked like, Dr. Batchelder_, the other whitecoat whines.

"Get. Out. Now," Jeb snarls, and the other whitecoat -- the bad one -- _runs_.

In a heartbeat, Jeb is there. "You OK?" he says, and brushes Iggy's hair out of his face.

"Yeah," Iggy says shakily.

"I won't let him near you again," Jeb says. "Never."

"Thanks," Iggy whispers, and clings to Jeb like he's all that Iggy can trust.


	7. Misconception

Oh, you were so beautiful,  
gasping under my touch,  
your back an elegant arch,  
the light spilling undone across and into your hair.

I made you for better things than this  
but it was good enough for us  
while it lasted.

When I told you all good things pass away --  
that all beauty fades --  
I was telling you about autumn leaves  
and their implacable chemical changes.  
I never imagined such a simple law  
as mutability  
could apply to you and I.

Once again I'm proven wrong.


	8. Taken

Brilliant falling-star eyes,  
Whose footprints are these?  
Someone has come to all my secret places  
Left fingerprints smeared on my heart  
Opened up a channel  
Of potential destruction.

And whose laughter is this,  
Ringing in the most secret  
Of my heart's corridors?  
The heart I locked away so long ago  
In a homemade pineside box  
With rusted keyplate:  
The key to which I made a gift.

Beloved, are these your footprints?  
I think it's your laughter that rings  
Down the silent halls tonight.  
I don't begrudge you that, no:  
I begrudge you your ability  
To wrest from my heart  
The energy I never knew it had:  
in the nuclei of atoms  
is fire enough to split the earth in two.


	9. Hiding

You've got to be some kind of magic. Or maybe just some kind of advanced science.

There's no other explanation for how you get away with this.

I used to think people believed what you said. The excuses you made.

But now I know that can't be true.

You think you're being so subtle, but you're the most obvious thing in the world.

No, no, no. Don't try to change. I like it.

I mean, I'm _blind_ and I can see what you're doing.

Do I care that they know?

Fuck no. Why should I?

I've got you, after all.


	10. Mapping the Stars

It's kind of sweet how you can't see the lines that bind us.

Because: Ella is Max's half-sister, and Max is your daughter, and I'm yours, and Ella has an embarrassing crush on me.

So where does that leave us?

Anywhere.

I can't see her, but I can hear the way Ella's fallen for me in her voice. And I know we might be in deep trouble.

But you still don't see it, even when I try to make you.

It would be funny if it didn't involve us.

How funny, we'd say.

What a mess those people are in.


	11. A Bitter Loss

Another 1.5 drabble.

* * *

These are the things he remembers: the angle of the light coming in through the window, dusty glass smeared with fingerprints; the hiss of static in his ear. The subtlety of loss.

Not every love is great. Or even worthy of memory. And some memories are fickle -- so fickle that even love, that seemed at the time to be all that was important in the world... even love fades from their minds, fast as the flick of a carp's tail in a fishpond.

"Are you there?" he's been calling, calling for years, and there has been no answer. "Will you come back?"

And maybe it's time, he's coming to realize: maybe it's time to let that go. To let these memories he holds so dear fade, until nothing remains.

Jeb hangs up before the call goes through. It's time to let all this go.

Iggy never loved him back, anyway.


	12. Fade

Jeb is disheveled, Iggy notices -- more so than usual. Though his shirt's unstained, with no rough patches of spilled chemicals, the top two buttons are undone, and that won't do.

"Here," Iggy murmurs, and fixes Jeb's buttons while the other man stands frozen, and the way he seems so undecided makes Iggy want to kiss him again, because it's just so _sweet_.

"Iggy... we can't..."

"Can't what?"

"We can't keep doing this," he whispers, as Iggy combs his fingers through Jeb's hair.

"Why?"

"We just _can't_," Jeb says bitterly.

"We will," Iggy answers, and pulls him close for another kiss.


	13. Astonishment

You are the finest  
Thing that I know.  
You puzzle me  
And in bewildering  
Delight.  
Your grace exceeds mine:  
Next to you I am  
A pale imitation  
Of perfection.


End file.
